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China is known for dragons, but this isn’t an Asian dragon: It’s Drogon from Game of Thrones, hanging out to promote Tencent and Yoozoo’s mobile game based on the show. (We think, despite his size, Drogon is still just a teenager here. Yikes.)
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Showgirls, dragons, and Fortnite’s school bus: ChinaJoy 2018 in pictures

Experience China’s biggest gaming show with us

Video gaming
Josh Ye
Josh Ye
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This article originally appeared on ABACUS

ChinaJoy is a pretty intense experience. China’s biggest game show is enormous: Thousands of attendees flood hundreds of booths across multiple convention halls in Shanghai. The booths are bright, colorful and extremely elaborate, with stage shows constantly taking place, trying to grab attention.

It’s a really cool environment, but also a little exhausting in person to constantly experience for eight hours a day. So we took a few pictures to allow you to feel some of the fun…without any of the overstimulation. Enjoy!

China is known for dragons, but this isn’t an Asian dragon: It’s Drogon from Game of Thrones, hanging out to promote Tencent and Yoozoo’s mobile game based on the show. (We think, despite his size, Drogon is still just a teenager here. Yikes.)
ChinaJoy isn’t just for Chinese companies — Sony, Microsoft, Nvidia, Ubisoft and many other Western gaming companies have a huge presence here.
Ubisoft has an amphitheater set up inside their booth for gamers to compete on stage.
Cosplayers are everywhere — JD.com actually hired these guys to, uh, pose? Hang out at their booth? (I’m not gonna lie, I’m not sure how to describe what it is cosplayers actually do.)
Fortnite was just released in China by Tencent. It’s not close to PUBG yet, but that isn’t stopping Tencent from giving the game a huge presence — including the iconic schoolbus.
ChinaJoy has long been notorious for scantily-clad women handy to draw the largely-male attendees to their booths. There are fewer of them than before, but as you can see from Vivo’s booth here, they’re still around.
Esports are huge in China, and heavily featured at ChinaJoy. Riot Games showed off a trophy from League of Legends at the show.
This is the biggest poster at the show. It belongs to a harem-building game which was banned by the government… so… I guess it’s back?
The first day of the show took place as a typhoon hit Shanghai — but that didn’t stop thousands of people from showing up and running from pavillion to pavillion in the rain.
Many of the booths looked like this: Bright lights, big screen, big stage. This is Bilibili, one of China’s biggest anime sites.
Two all-female esports teams competing inside of Optimus Prime. Just a normal ChinaJoy thing.
Most visitors flock to the consumer-focused pavilions, but there are two B2B pavilions. One belongs to Facebook, which joined ChinaJoy for the first time.
Both Unity and Unreal, two dominant game engines, are present at ChinaJoy… though these attendees don’t seem too excited about it.
When the convention ends at 5, it’s absolute mayhem. Massive queues appear outside every entrance to the nearest subway station.
But if you want more, there are plenty of gaming-themed afterparties to attend after the show. (I really hope they served chicken dinner at the PUBG party.)

Sony, Microsoft, Tencent and Xiaomi jostle for attention at China’s biggest gaming show

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